


The hawk outpacing

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Jewel in the Crown (TV)
Genre: Falconry, Gen, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 11:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9320615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Three conversations that didn't happen, but could have.*Note: canon-typical background racism.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> This fic is set in the final third of episode 13, 'Pandora's Box', after Sarah and Guy watch Ahmed hawking. Details from my headcanon for the TV series characters may contradict those given in the _Raj Quartet_ , which I've only just started reading.
> 
> A response to a prompt from havisham, for whom it's also a [belated Yuletide treat](http://moetushie.dreamwidth.org/400844.html). I couldn't make an actual threesome happen (because I generally fail at porn) but there is a cameo for havisham's dream of Guy Perron needling Ralph Lanyon (shippily if you squint) on a big boat.

‘Slight change of plan,’ Sarah said, leaning into the passenger side of the jeep. ‘Dmitri’s still very anxious to see you, Guy, but the Nawab’s detained him for at least another half an hour. And Shinaz is ill, so the swimming lesson is off too.’

Ahmed turned, frowning, from contemplation of the road and the soldiers in the truck parked ahead. ‘Nothing serious? The day before yesterday she was crying, and wouldn’t say what was wrong.’ 

‘A passing indisposition, I think.’ 

Guy hoped that the look of embarrassed realisation on Ahmed’s face was not replicated on his own; an amused twitch of Sarah’s lips and eyebrows told him the hope was vain. 

‘Why don’t you both have coffee?’ Ahmed said. ‘I have a few things to see to at the mews before I join you.’ 

When the jeep had pulled off and they’d turned for the palace, Guy said, ‘Tell me there were some actual crooks, cramps and apostumes of the head in that, as well as a wholly unnecessary tact.’ 

‘I didn’t know you knew anything about hawks.’ 

‘I don’t. Just the words. From a neighbour of Aunt Charlotte’s. They used to rake away about once a fortnight, as I remember, and we’d all dash from one end of the county to the other pursuing them.’ 

‘Yes, probably, to answer your question. He’s very serious about it.’ 

‘Serious about quite a lot. I gather one is supposed to express astonishment, but I can’t, not with any conviction. At least it shut me up before I started quoting the obvious bit of Yeats.’ 

The radiance of Sarah’s smile wasn’t wholly attributable to the shaft of sunlight breaking into the gatehouse arch from the postern. Much as it improved a complexion already clear and fine, Guy thought on the whole he could have lived with a little less of a glow. 

‘She _can_ hear the falconer, you mean? It’s a foolish thing to pin any hope on, but I do, nonetheless,’ she said. ‘I say, do you actually want coffee?’ 

‘No, not if you don’t.’ 

‘Let’s just sit out for a bit. There’s still a breath of morning cool left.’ 

‘I was reminded of somebody,’ Guy resumed, leaning against the terrace parapet, while Sarah looked out over the lake, steely and unreflective. Sweepers scurried and a gardener deliberated in the courtyard below. The sweet odours of gardenia, champa and jasmine, made piquant by something unutterably rank, mingled with the sluggish, muddy breeze from the shore. He offered her a cigarette; his lighter sparked on the third attempt. He really did have the most infernal bad luck with them: as soon as he laid hands on one that worked, someone walked off with it. ‘By Ahmed, I mean. A man I shipped back with, at the end of the war. He was something in naval intelligence, but I never found out more, he was too correct to let anything slip. But for one reason or another we kept being thrown together. I don’t think I’ve given him a thought since, until I saw Ahmed this morning. The self-containment was the same, the dignity, a faint abstracted courtesy to a vulgar world that won’t accommodate the slightest deviation.’ 

‘An Englishman?’ 

‘Mm. Very much so. He looked like Merrick, actually. I hadn’t thought of that before, either. Wiry build, thinning fair hair, a narrow face under a brow too heavy for it. He’d been wounded, too; not nearly as badly. Lost a couple of fingers at Dunkirk. But demeanour makes up so much of one’s perception of a person, don’t you think? He gave off this great sense of scruple and generosity, despite the reserve. A tremendous capacity for kindness.’ 

‘Ronnie could be kind,’ she said, with the cautious air of one satisfying herself that a received idea still contained enough truth to be spoken, adding, as honesty encroached upon loyalty, ‘in small things. He loved Edward, quite sincerely. I think he’d resolved to treat Su as gently as he could, and mostly did, too—what?’ 

Guy swore inventively, if inwardly; yesterday’s encounter with Susan had renewed his determination that her family should hear nothing, or as little as possible, of what Sophie Dixon had told him, but he must nonetheless have flinched. Foul, unprofitable speculations upon the exact use Merrick had made of Susan’s psychiatric records he was no stranger to: they threatened now, to be joined by others concerning what he was only certain was _not_ a cerebral haemorrhage following a fall from a horse. He thrust them aside with an effort that felt more physical than mental. 

‘Nothing. I was going to say something facile. That it doesn’t begin to atone for—but that’s not the point, is it? I can’t quite swallow the line that he was good with the boy, but it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. Bumptious little misogynist, like most of us at four and a half, I suppose.’ 

‘Girls especially. He was, though, Ronald, I mean. I know, people who were neglected and ill-treated as children can’t usually make up for it, as much as they might want to. They’ve no resources to draw upon. But what little he had, he gave Edward all of it. I’m sorry—you were talking about this other man, on the ship.’ 

‘Oh, there’s not much more to tell. I suspected he disliked me, and I found that curiously hard to take. So I needled him rather; it became a sort of compulsion.’ He flicked his cigarette-end over the parapet. 

‘Ahmed doesn’t dislike you,’ she said. ‘Just the opposite. Do you feel the compulsion? It didn’t show at breakfast, if that helps to know.’ 

Belatedly, Guy realised he had admitted something. A recursive, perverse recollection, not of the afternoon in the Moghul Room itself, but of the unedifying uses he had made of the memory since, arose to exacerbate his confusion. Sarah slumped in the wrought-iron seat, squinting at the sky as she took a last drag of her cigarette. 

‘No, I didn’t,’ he stammered. ‘That’s not what I was trying to say. I’m sorry—I—’ 

She exhaled smoke and drawled, ‘—put it very badly?’ 

The impersonation was not pitch-perfect, it couldn’t be that, but better: cadence-perfect, phoneme-perfect, the grating, strangled disharmony of a voice that its owner has almost succeeded in changing. She sat up in horror, eyes wide, flinging the cigarette butt viciously away. 

‘Guy—I didn’t mean—I mean, you’re absolutely the only person on earth I could have forgotten myself enough with to—’ She dropped her head into her hands. 

He laughed weakly. ‘It’s all right. The N.C.O.’s mess at the hospital in Pankot resounded with it. None as good as yours, though. They were all coming at the vowels from the wrong side.’ He reached to tap her shoulder in reassurance, but the face she turned up to his was distorted at once with self-exculpatory fury and disgust at it, on the blubbered margin of tears, and he drew back his hand. 

‘I hated him, Guy. When I was small, I used to wish I had a brother, instead of timid little Susan. It was like one of those horrible fairy-tales, you know, where it comes true. You can’t imagine—no, maybe _you_ can.’ 

‘I don’t think so. One has to get a bit closer to the front than I ever did for the _so long as ye both shall live_ clause to kick in with one’s C.O.’ 

‘That’s the thing. I’m—I’m glad he’s—’ 

‘Shh.’ Unnoticed by either of them, a servant had climbed the staircase and approached with a message: His Excellency would receive Perron sahib now; his Secretary was in the courtyard and would conduct him— 

At the base of the stairs, amidst the cool colonnades and chatter of fountains, Guy said, ‘Tell me. Before I meet Bronowsky. What did happen to Ronald? Was it a riding accident?’ 

‘Don’t ask me, Guy. Ask Nigel. Or Dmitri. Or better still, ask nobody.’ She looked at the ground for a second, then raised her chin proudly and waved to Ahmed. Guy sensed that he would never now tell her what he had wanted to, what he had been fumbling towards with his reminiscence of the naval officer who looked like Merrick and bore himself like an internal exile: that Ahmed Kasim’s detachment might conceal a terrifying propensity to self-immolation, from which even the best-devoted love would struggle to preserve him. 

* 

‘We’re not rivals, you know,’ Ahmed said. For him, a picnic breakfast had clearly not quite served to solidify first-name terms; a bracketed silence now obtained where _Mr Perron_ had been. This sudden candour was a social test of the sort Guy was inclined to pose himself: he passed it easily, ( _another Send Up, Perron? You ferocious blot_ ) but then, he was meant to. 

‘No. That would be excessively tedious, don’t you think?’ 

‘Yes, and quite apart from everything else,’ (admirable laconism, Guy considered, for three hundred years of racialist prohibition), ‘Dmitri has earmarked me for Shinaz. Or her for me. It wouldn’t do.’ 

‘And will you acquiesce?’ 

‘More a question of whether she agrees. In three or five years, perhaps, she will be a very attractive and personable young woman.’ 

Their steps resounded in the tiled corridor. ‘And not at all your sort of thing?’ 

‘Reputation, reputation, reputation,’ Ahmed pronounced with ironic gravity. ‘I have lost the immortal part of myself.’ 

Guy laughed. ‘Well, I can’t protest that without putting myself in a rather invidious position, but I think you’ve more than recovered it.’ 

‘Pity. There are certain advantages to never being taken very seriously.’ Light from the ornately-worked windows stippled Ahmed’s face and beard, blotched his glossy hair: he seemed for a moment interrupted and insubstantial, as if a supernal projectionist had flubbed changing the reel. He stood aside and motioned Guy into the carpeted, quasi-European ambience of Bronowsky’s apartments. ‘The fact is, I like the company of women. I mean that—without euphemism. They are on balance more intelligent and more restful. Men must always be placated. I won’t deny that I am sometimes attracted, and not infrequently act upon it. But it seems that the better I get to know a woman, the less I want to go to bed with her. Not true of men, however.’ 

‘Ah, Mr Perron—’ Bronowsky emerged from his drawing room, plunging directly into his expansive, courtly rattle. Recalling Ahmed’s last few words that afternoon, in a whiskified drowse over the _Ranpur Gazette_ , Guy concluded that he must surely have misheard, or misunderstood. He had not, though, mistaken his own response to the mishearing, and that, perhaps, was worthy of further reflection. But not yet. 

* 

‘Are you in love with him?’ 

Ahmed watched Sarah weigh a temporising _who?_ and dismiss it as coquetry. 

‘No, I don’t think I can be. He wrote to me, after he was demobbed. Nice letters, a bit more donnish than he is in life. I even replied to one of them.’ 

‘I hope you don’t mind—I genuinely couldn’t tell, and thought it best just to ask.’ 

‘No. I don’t mind. You know, this scarf—it was his parting gift, last time.’ 

‘You wear it often.’ 

‘And I almost never think of him when I do. It’s just a pretty scarf.’ 

‘Hm. He has an eye for pattern and colour. Most Cambridge dons, I think, would have plumped for a safe sky-blue.’ 

‘I didn’t say he bought it for me. A re-purposed present for _one of the Perron womenfolk_ , I think that was his phrase. He didn’t have time to buy anything specially. But I suppose if she has roughly his colouring too, the point still stands.’ 

She turned to look at him, defiantly teetering on the scalloped border of a bed of Madonna lilies. It wasn't a blunder, then. She'd meant to disclose the circumstances of that parting nearly two years before. It was rather brave, and unkind, but that was the English way, a courage functionally indistinguishable from cruelty. Later, Ahmed would examine his feelings as if they were pinned out for dissection, finding that the crude, lacerating jealousy emanated from a location mildly unexpected. He threw his head back and forced laughter. 

‘No, I revoke. He is conventional even in his unconventionalities. Will you marry him?’ 

‘He hasn’t asked me. And I don’t think he will.’ 

‘I think he will.’ 

‘Then no. Su’s speciality is marrying men she doesn’t love, and look how those turned out.’ 

‘Unfair to Perron, surely? He is civilised. One can talk to him. There’s the dinner gong. We should go back.’ 

‘I’m sorry—I know it’s something of a luxury, being able to set love as one’s criterion.’ 

Ahmed hadn’t intended the conversation to turn in that direction, and hurriedly reached for raillery. ‘I suppose a wager would be very improper.’ 

‘Yes, unforgivably tasteless. That he’ll ask, or that he’ll ask and I’ll accept?’ 

‘The latter. Odds-on isn’t much of a thrill.’ 

‘An eyas,’ she said decisively, as if she’d been contemplating the terms of the bet for some time. ‘I’d love to man one, have it out at hack. Everything. You could teach me.’ 

‘Done.’ He held out his hand. 

She made a decorous pantomime of spitting into hers, and shook. He laughed, genuinely this time, but the frisson of racial constraint, a sort of membranous shiver, seemed more tangible than at any time since their first, inhibited ride together. He held aside a low-hanging chamror branch for her to pass. ‘But you’re going back to England. Epsom. I’m afraid I shall never be able to think of you without being reminded of bath salts and the Derby.’ 

She grinned. ‘If—when I win, I’ll come and collect all right.’ 

‘And I—I suppose I’ll still be here. Part of the new India. You know the Nawab signed the papers?’ 

They walked back to the palace without speaking, listening to the doves, cicadas and crows, the faint shouts of the fishermen from the lake that was once again, for howsoever short a time, honoured with their labour.

**Author's Note:**

> The fic title is from the poem by the (invented) poet Gaffur that we see Guy reading on the train in the final episode.
> 
> [Obvious Yeats is obvious.](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43290)
> 
> Send Up: this is actually Harrow slang, for a good piece of work commended by a master, but why not transfer it to Chillingborough? 
> 
> Ahmed quotes Cassio, from _Othello_ , II, iii; to protest that his reputation is not in fact lost puts Guy in the position of Iago.


End file.
